Algorithmic Intimacies (2019-2020)
InterfaceImmersive and interactive installation VR
Interface view
Algorithmic Intimacies is an immersive and interactive installation that reinterprets the jalsa, a communal gathering associated with trance, healing, and spirit mediation, as a contemporary, networked ritual. Drawing on anthropological accounts of zar practices across East Africa, and the Arabian Gulf, the work approaches the jalsa as a transregional, performative system rooted in rhythm, repetition, and collective participation. Zar ceremonies historically mobilize music, embodiment, and altered states to negotiate unseen forces and emotional distress, offering participants a structured space in which to externalize and process internal experience.
Within this installation, that ritual structure is translated into a digital environment, where trance is no longer induced through drums and incense but through interfaces, algorithms, and continuous streams of mediated exchange. Participants enter a liminal space that echoes the jalsa’s suspension of everyday norms: a zone where identities are fluid, voices are disembodied, and presence is distributed across a network. Here, the “winds” invoked are not external entities but data traces, projections, and algorithmic reflections of the self, surfacing through interaction.
IIn this installation digital ephemera is used as material by the artist. Contributions, including: memes, voice notes, fragments of text, video clips, are generated collaboratively by participants and circulated within the installation. These fragments are performative acts, each carrying affective and symbolic weight. They accumulate, disperse, and reconfigure, forming a living archive that is both collective and unstable.
The installation thus constructs a “third space” that parallels the jalsa’s role as a site of mediation between worlds. Participants are invited to confront the intimacies they form with and through technological systems, tracing how emotion, memory, and identity are redistributed. It highlights continuities between embodied and mediated forms of collective experience, and asks how contemporary technologies might function as new ritual infrastructures, and how ephemeral digital exchanges can operate as meaningful, affective, and even therapeutic acts.
Mosaic Rooms press release can be found [here]
Installation view bellow:
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Algorithmic Intimacies is an immersive and interactive installation that reinterprets the jalsa, a communal gathering associated with trance, healing, and spirit mediation, as a contemporary, networked ritual. Drawing on anthropological accounts of zar practices across East Africa, and the Arabian Gulf, the work approaches the jalsa as a transregional, performative system rooted in rhythm, repetition, and collective participation. Zar ceremonies historically mobilize music, embodiment, and altered states to negotiate unseen forces and emotional distress, offering participants a structured space in which to externalize and process internal experience.
Within this installation, that ritual structure is translated into a digital environment, where trance is no longer induced through drums and incense but through interfaces, algorithms, and continuous streams of mediated exchange. Participants enter a liminal space that echoes the jalsa’s suspension of everyday norms: a zone where identities are fluid, voices are disembodied, and presence is distributed across a network. Here, the “winds” invoked are not external entities but data traces, projections, and algorithmic reflections of the self, surfacing through interaction.
IIn this installation digital ephemera is used as material by the artist. Contributions, including: memes, voice notes, fragments of text, video clips, are generated collaboratively by participants and circulated within the installation. These fragments are performative acts, each carrying affective and symbolic weight. They accumulate, disperse, and reconfigure, forming a living archive that is both collective and unstable.
The installation thus constructs a “third space” that parallels the jalsa’s role as a site of mediation between worlds. Participants are invited to confront the intimacies they form with and through technological systems, tracing how emotion, memory, and identity are redistributed. It highlights continuities between embodied and mediated forms of collective experience, and asks how contemporary technologies might function as new ritual infrastructures, and how ephemeral digital exchanges can operate as meaningful, affective, and even therapeutic acts.
Mosaic Rooms press release can be found [here]
Installation view bellow:
